Paul Elisha: One Nation Indivisible - Re-Discovered

This veteran of too much war and too much talk of it with too little substance, at too great an expense for too many to pay and too few to benefit, has discovered a long neglected and priceless truth, that we now can only ignore at our irrevocable peril. In the Fourth Century-B.C., the super-wise philosopher Sun Tzu uttered an incontestable truth, still valid and destined to remain so: “It is best,” he said, “to win without fighting.” His wisdom was preceded by several generations of combatant statesmen, who were described by a contemporary historian as “…those with the clearest vision of the glory and danger before them, who notwithstanding, still went out to meet it.”

The combative leaders of Athens, Troy and other contingent city-states ruled and came to ruin, along with their families and followers; then relinquished power, forever, as their custom commanded and for some, their lives, as ordained.

This is now the premise and price of our own nation’s redemption. Those who propose and pursue warfare must hereafter agree to become its primary participants and the sole redeemers of its costs and cataclysmic conclusions. Americans can no longer afford to deal with the depressive duality that separates the privileged from ‘The People’. This proven process will once again honestly identify us as indivisible, with “…liberty and justice for all.”

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The year was 1936 and this now grizzled and sometimes forgetful WWII Veteran sat in the front seat of the family Chevrolet with his father; a good spot from which a fourteen-year-old could observe and prep for that future day, when he might become a responsible driver. We had just pulled up to the tanks, in front of the local gas station and the proprietor came out to greet us, the ever-present chamois in hand. “What’ll it be, Al,” he asked, to which my Dad replied: “The usual; fill’er up, John.” To which John responded, as follows: wiped both the rear window and windshield; checked the tires, then opened the hood to check both water and oil. When all of these were done, he filled the gas tank.

What does the phrase:”National Destiny,” truly mean? Too often, the impassioned palaver of politicians simply get it wrong. Here, where the spirit of the self-proclaimed destiny of unified accomplishment became the gargantuan model of every free individual’s dream, we have created ‘Nervana-Run-Amock.’ The result has been the ‘Malling’ of America, with ‘Big-Box’ outlets and Strip-Malls covering every vestige of green that Nature has grown. This evolution has been accompanied by the corrosion of a nationwide network of infrastructure, unmatched in any other populous expanse. This is the burden with which our ‘National Destiny’ of material acquisition has endowed us. Now our problem is: What to do about it?

Watching the manically depressed oscillation of an appreciable segment of this nation’s political leadership, during the past several days, hyper-ventilating between vociferous variables over implausible positions, on whether or not to consign poverty-plagued children to starvation-edged cutoffs in their already meager Food-Stamp allotments; and/or exposing their inherently stunted gender incongruity in a malicious maneuver against mysterious female body-parts, for which they secretly hunger, one explication came to mind: an aversion expressed by philosopher Blaise Pascal, nearly four-hundred years earlier, at the irritating repudiation exhibited by the male of the species: “…….what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble sink of uncertainty and error, both the glory and the shame of the universe,” he wrote.